


to pour every sun upon you

by MidwesternDuchess



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, I just needed to Write Something after that Fucking Cutscene, I wrote it in two hours without editing what does this even say, anyway let's all be real fucking sad together huh, post-time skip spoilers, this is so self-indulgent and dramatic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 07:51:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20060563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidwesternDuchess/pseuds/MidwesternDuchess
Summary: "Hold on to my wreckage or please / let me go." -Eileen G'Sell(He thinks her a ghost. She thinks him lost. Neither knows themselves.)





	to pour every sun upon you

Carnage litters the path Byleth walks, but for once, she is not the source.

Carefully picking her way around dozens of dead Imperial soldiers, Byleth allows herself to search out a wound—to confirm what she has suspected since she heard the villager speak of a lone figure—more mythic than man, a monster, he called him—lurking in the ruins of the monastery.

She kneels beside a nearby body, looking askance at the sigil of the Imperial Army emblazoned on its breastplate, the red insignia camouflaged against the ruby blood smeared across it.

Her eyes find the wound quite quickly, and with a murmured word of apology to the body, Byleth rises to her feet.

Death by lance.

Byleth keeps walking.

The world is silent—eerily so. Quiet like the monastery never was—like it was never intended to be. Not when it was alive with so many voices, so many people, so much life. She plays her gaze across the ruins, memory filling in the gaps left by time and war. There is where the stables would have stood, and behind them, a hole she recalls once filled by a distant tower. To the west—rubble and ash scattered in place of the dormitories. A strip of yellow fabric she imagines once hung proudly as a banner of the Golden Deer flaps limply in the breeze where it’s caught on a gnarled tree limb.

_Five years._ Goddess help her.

There’s a streak of movement out of the corner of her eye, and Byleth’s gaze darts to it in time to watch a cat scamper off, muzzle streaked red. The silence weighs on her as she continues on—somehow heavier than it had been after Sothis had torn herself apart for Byleth’s sake, more suffocating that that moment when Byleth had been thrown into the chasm, looking up with wild eyes to see the sky closing in above as the earth entombed her, rocks swallowing her body whole, her scream buried under a mountain of rubble—

A hiss breaks her thoughts as she crosses paths with another cat, this one larger than the first, boldly bristling as it meets her stare with a curled lip before vanishing amongst the wreckage. Byleth follows it as it streaks past the dining hall—laid to ruin with no walls to keep out the elements—before vanishing amidst the overgrown mess of the gardens. She can hardly see the gazebo peeking out from a hideous nest of vines, and the bushes have gone so long unchecked that at her angle, they block out the stars.

The Sword of the Creator is a comforting weight at her side—something to anchor herself to, a way to balance out the stifling silence—as she mounts the stairs to the Cathedral.

The doors are closed, the balcony empty. Byleth glances behind her and immediately regrets the action—stomach swooping at the blood spattered across the stairs below her, bold and red against the white marble she's climbed only yesterday.

_No. _Not yesterday. Five _years_ worth of yesterdays.

Turning to face the door, Byleth skims the symbol of Serios with the lightest of touches before she braces her shoulder against the stone, grimacing as she forces it open. The structure groans in protest, and she only manages to prise it open a few inches before it holds fast, and Byleth gasps as the newfound resistance nearly costs her her balance.

Still, the gap is wide enough for her to slip through, and she does, squinting into the darkness of the Cathedral, following the path cut by the stretch of moonlight spilling in, deeper and deeper—

A rustle—the hiss of leather on stone. Byleth spins, one hand on the hilt of her blade, eyes narrowing as she searches the darkness—

One eye gleams back at her, caught in the silver of light she let in when she opened the door.

She isn’t alone.

A figure looms before her, suddenly—tall, _Goddess_ how tall—and Byleth is backing up before she even knows what she’s doing, hand reaching wildly for her blade—

“Come to mock me,” the figure asks, voice rough with disuse, scratchy and hoarse and _ruinous._

Byleth’s back hits the wall. The figure takes her place in the light.

“...Professor?”

Gold hair—pale in the faint light—and features so sharp they throw shadows across the rest of his face—

_“Dimitri,”_ she breathes.

And Goddess—it’s him, isn’t it? How could it not be? Her eyes rove over him—skimming his profile, committing these new features to memory, comparing them against the face she knew—dented armor as black as pitch, a swath of furs cloaking his shoulders, a patch covering his right eye—

Dimitri considers her carefully, stepping towards her, and in the darkness, without the soft shine of moonlight, Byleth sees he could be anyone—no trace of the person she came here to find—

“You’ve never answered me before,” he murmurs. “You never speak.” He takes another step, and Byleth reaches behind herself, palm flat against the wall, free hand aching to draw her blade—

“How could you?” He’s impossibly close now—Byleth could trace a finger along the criss-crossed gouge in his chest plate if she so wished. She searches his face for any sign of her student—her friend, her Prince, her Blue Lion, _Dimitri—_

His hand comes up—fast as thought, Byleth can hardly track the flash of his armor in the moonlight before he seizes her by the throat—

“You’re nothing but a ghost.”

Byleth _chokes—_her hands fly to her neck, grappling with Dimitri’s grip as she works to tug herself free, spots dancing at the edges of her vision and _Goddess_ is this it? Here? After all she’s been through? At the hands of—?

His metal gauntlet digs painfully into the column of her throat, thumb pinned against her windpipe—night looms, darkness threatening to overwhelm her, and she gargles on her last breath, shuttered vision streaked red with anger_—_it can’t end like this it **_can’t—_**

The Sword of the Creator erupts suddenly—flaring up in a riotous flash of light that’s blinding in the darkness of the chamber—a beacon hanging from her hip as her sword rouses itself, answering the call of her rage with a brilliant burst that swallows the nearby shadows and bathes the pair of them in its wild, flickering light.

Immediately, the pressure vanishes.

Byleth sags, bracing her arm against a shattered pillar, breath returning in uneven gasps as she gags on the taste of death, tracking Dimitri through the haze of asphyxiation that clouds her sight where he stands, aglow in the fiery light of her weapon.

That lone eye—ringed with shadows, sharper than she remembers, but Goddess as blue as anything she’ll ever see—assess her as Dimitri slinks away, mantle skimming the across the stones and spilling down the steps.

“You’re out of practice,” she manages around the burning in her throat. Instincts rasp that she stay silent, draw her blade, engage the threat, _survive—_but Byleth minds none of them. She rightens her stance, still leaning heavily on the pillar as her breathing begins to even. “I always taught you to follow through on an attack.”

Dimitri looks _murderous_—he prowls along the the ruined floor of the chapel, single eye never leaving her face as he paces, the rhythmic snap of his lace against his armor so jarring Byleth almost commands him to stop.

“How did you come across the Sword of the Creator?” he hisses. “Where did you find her body—how did you recover it?”

Byleth scowls, pushing off the wall, embolden by his distance.

“I can’t very well recover something that was already _mine,”_ she snaps at him, temper flaring as it always did and Goddess, here they are again, too young and too angry and too close for their own good. Time means nothing when the person you’re searching for lives in your very bones. “And I resent your implication that anyone could _ever_ take this blade from me.”

She advances sharply, cloak snapping at her heels, the Crest of the Blue Lions pinned proudly at her breast—a gift, Goddess, a gift on her birthday, how shyly he’d given it to her, how he could hardly meet her eyes—

Dimitri’s lance clears its sheath with a shrill ring—steel shrieking as he pulls it off his back, movements so unpolished but faster than she’s ever seen—and she glares as he levels it at her.

“What are you _doing, _Dimitri?” she asks, voice low and coiled in her throat. The Sword of the Creator pulses at her side—drinking greedily from her anger, gorged on a temper five years fiercer—but she refuses to draw it.

There’s no recognition in his eye—no sudden spark, the way there always was when he realized he’d overstepped, tapped too deep into the darkness, sunk dangerously low. No hastened apologies, quick exits. Dimitri seems almost proud to bear this newfound malevolence—has crowned himself with the gloom.

“A spy then,” he reasons, and Byleth grits her teeth. “You’re quite good, I must admit. And that sword is a perfect replica.”

Byleth stares past the lance point to look up into his face, longing to wipe a blank mask across her features, urging herself to shelve her anger, to hide her pain, to just _survive _but without Sothis to temper her, to balance her, it all tumbles down and Byleth bares her teeth—

“What’s _happened _to you?” Byleth demands, raised voice echoing painfully up the high walls of the Cathedral. “You draw a weapon on me and yet _I’m _a spy? A _ghost?”_

He works his jaw, keeping his weapon trained as she takes an experimental step to the side. He isn’t following her eyes, she notices suddenly. He’s staring at the sword at her side like he’s seeing the sun for the first time in ages, and all at once, Byleth feels her resolve _break—_

“You were with me when I found it,” she tells him quietly. Her hand falls to cover the hilt as she peers up at him—Goddess, how tall he’s gotten. “Don't you remember?”

He stares back at her and _there_—a crack in his cruelty. A flash of the boy she knew, the young Prince she’d chosen all those years ago.

She steps forward, careful to telegraph the movement. “We were in the Holy Mausoleum, fighting the dissenters of the Western Church.”

The memory is so clear—the torchlight shimmering across Dimitri’s armor, lance flashing as he cut down an archer aiming for her exposed back as she’d swept forward, ducking under his arm at the precise moment to slit the throat of a mage who’d pursued him—

She smiles—faintly. “You asked to hold it. Seteth wouldn’t hear of it, but I handed it over anyway. You were so gentle, so afraid you’d break it—”

“I break everything,” he murmurs reflexively, and Byleth’s smile grows stronger because he’s _here_, right here in front of her, this Prince who teaches swordplay to anyone who asks, who weathers every insult thrown against him with a calm smile, who gifts young girls with daggers so they can cut their own path, who carries the future of a failing kingdom across his shoulders and only stands taller as a result—he’s here and she’ll _never_ lose him again—

He falls to his knees, and Byleth scrambles forward, clutching at his shoulders, trying to break his fall—

The Sword of the Creator goes dim, and they are plunged again into the darkness of the Cathedral.

“I’m trying,” he whispers, and _Goddess _his voice _aches. _“She’s too strong yet, and only getting stronger—but I swear to you I’m _trying.”_

Byleth cards a hand through his hair, lips at his temple, words unable to find a handhold on her tongue as she simply _holds _him—

“Dimitri—” she tires.

“You’re _dead,” _and _Goddess_ Byleth flinches at the despair in his voice. “I couldn’t save you, couldn’t save my father, my stepmother, my friends, couldn’t save _anyone _so what _good _am I—?”

His fist smashes against the ground, and Byleth winces as the stone cracks under the force—marble splintering beneath his rage.

“I’m not the King of Lions—I’m the King of Goddess-damned _Ghosts.”_

“You aren’t,” Byleth whispers, and through the hole in her heart—the ragged wound left behind when Sothis tore herself out—she chokes down tears. Byleth swallows thickly, clutching him tighter. “You _aren’t, _Dimitri. You’re the Prince of Faerghus, the Head of Blue Lion House—you’re my _friend—”_

He groans then, pained as though she’d run him straight through, and bows his head against her chest.

“Why are you _doing _this?” he hisses, taking hold of her arm so tightly Byleth goes breathless at the pressure. “Why make it harder—how can you hurt me _more? _I have nothing left to give, just _leave _me.”

He trembles at her touch—hands shaking where he holds her, like he’s trying to anchor himself here, to her, to this moment, and Byleth’s heart _breaks—_

_“Dima,” _she breathes, voice catching on the sobriquet, threatening to break. “It’s me. I’m not a ghost, I’m not a spy. I swear to you on all that I am—I am _here.”_

Silence lapses, and Byleth despairs, quietly, worried she’s lost him—worried she never found him at all—

“I don’t know what’s real,” he whispers, voice so quiet she can feel the rumble of his chest more than she can hear his words. His single eye stares up at her, and Byleth chokes at the naked fear there. “I don’t know which ghost is coming to kill me next.”

“No ghosts,” Byleth tells him softly. “Not anymore. Come on.” She rises to her feet—he clutches desperately at her, refusing to let go—and extends a hand down to him, jaw set. “We’re leaving. Together.”

For a moment, he only stares at it, and Byleth wonders what she will do if he refuses—worse, if he retaliates—but she keeps her hand absolutely steady, staring him dead in the eye, daring him to do anything other than what she’s asked.

His armor is cold—gauntlet sharp enough on her hand to make her neck ache—and she grimaces as she hauls him to his feet, watching as he once again rises to loom above her.

She’s just about to say something—a thousand questions crowd her mouth, weighing down her tongue—when there’s a sudden, distant shout—

“What was that?” Byleth asks, and part of her—stupid, so _stupid—_thinks it’s them, the others, her students, the Blue Lions—but Dimitri only sneers.

_“Rats,”_ he hisses, and Byleth scrambles to the side as he goes striding past her, any sign she’s seen of the Dimitri she’d known scrubbed clean from his face as he forces the doors wide open, prompting a horrific groan that sounds so like a human’s wail it sets Byleth’s teeth on edge as she follows him.

“Rats?” she dares to ask, skirting his form as she stands on the balcony, overlooking the monastery grounds.

“Bandits,” he spits the word. “Thieves, rouges. Scourge of the world.”

Byleth swallows—if the Sword of the Creator answered to him, fed on _his_ anger, she thinks the resulting light would blind the sun.

“Do they camp on the monastery grounds?” she asks, searching the darkened ground below them. “I didn’t pass anything on my way—”

He jabs a finger to the east, and Byleth forces herself not to flinch at the sudden movement.

“Their nest to that way,” he tells her harshly. “I’d been planning on rooting them out later, but it seems they’ve decided to make a nuisance of themselves.”

Byleth eyes him at the edge of her vision.

_“I used to be a thief,” _Ashe had murmured to her so long ago, so early that year, her brave young boy who stood as tall as he could—a commoner awash in a crowd of nobles. _“It was the only way I could keep my siblings fed.”_

_“His Highness—that is, uh Prince Dimitri—I was so worried he’d hate me for it, that he’d, y’know,” _Ashe had twisted his hands restlessly, ducking her gaze. _“Revoke my acceptance to the school. But, uh, he didn’t mind. He—he told me that it was the country that failed me—not, not the other way around. He said it should have never gotten to a point where I **had **to steal.”_

_“There is no shame in survival,” _Byleth had agreed, hoping to put him at ease with a smile, but Ashe recoiled like he’d struck her.

_“Oh, Goddess, no I mean—His Highness would—I mean, it’s just, I don’t think he’d ever say anything quite like **that,” **_he’d forced an uneasy laugh. _“I think...well, don’t—don’t ever repeat this, but. Sometimes I think Prince Dimitri...I think he really **is **ashamed that he survived.”_

A cool breeze drifts across the balcony, and if Byleth closes her eyes, it could be any other night.

“We can take care of them together,” Byleth murmurs, and what else can she say? The Sword of the Creator hums at her hip—sizzles and snaps with the promise of a fight, and Byleth finds she can refuse neither of them.

Her weapon sings as she draws it—the haunting note of a Hero’s Relic—and she stares him in the eye.

“Together?” he questions, not sounding doubtful but rather—like he’s tasting it, reacquainting himself with something he’s long forgotten.

“Together,” Byleth agrees, soaking the single word with as much devotion as she can—_ever at your side, always at your back, whether here or the Kingdom or the Empire or anywhere you may go, I will always find you—_

A howl pierces the night—Byleth whirls, searching the lower levels of the monastery for a Demonic Beast, and finds a pack of four leering up at them.

She stiffens as he brushes up against her—so tall her head hardly reaches his furred mantle—as he peers over her to assess the situation.

“We’ll follow them,” he decides, as the Beasts skulk through the rubble. “They’re after the rats, not us.”

_Rats._ Byleth bites her tongue, forces a nod.

_Later,_ she reasons, as Dimitri passes his gaze over her, searching for Goddess only knows what in her expression. _There will be time for that later._

For once, Byleth is dully cheered she doesn’t have Sothis lurking in her mind to disagree with her.

“Very well then,” Dimitri murmurs, and Byleth _shivers_—his voice is off, so dark and cold—

His lance gleams in the moonlight as he moves towards the stairs, throwing a look over his shoulder—one eye crinkled with a smirk that makes her wonder if she isn’t a ghost after all, if this isn’t some dark dream, some horrible impossibility that could never be brought to bear—

Dimitri’s smile is _feral. _“Let’s go hunting.”

**Author's Note:**

> I DID IT I WROTE THE SAD THING DON'T EVEN LOOK AT ME WHERE IS MY OPTION TO HUG DIMITRI HUH INTSYS WHERE IS MY PRESS X TO HUG
> 
> I deadass forgot the canon dialogue Dimitri hits you with in the actual cutscene and do not possess the emotional stability needed to watch that scene again so I just made some edgy shit up and I think it works fine
> 
> <strike>no spoilers in the comments or I'll devour you I'm not done with the game yet</strike>
> 
> come yell at me in my pit of despair [@reduxwriter](https://twitter.com/reduxwriter) if you're so inclined AGAIN NO SPOILERS PLEASE I BEG OF YOU
> 
> I've been around the Fire Emblem block a time or two, you can read my other stuff from a variety of the games [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=fire+emblem&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&user_id=MidwesternDuchess) if you'd like
> 
> have a good day <strike>BLUE LIONS FOREVERRRRRR</strike>
> 
> oh also PS I have a completely baseless but persistent headcanon that the Sword of the Creator responds to Byleth's mood, mostly her anger, and whenever she gets pissy or feels threatened it lights up like a glow stick. just a visual I liked
> 
> title is from a Friedrich Nietzche quote: "I poured every sun upon you and every night and every silence and every longing."


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